Notes With Pleasure

Published: June 21, 1992

Peter Mayle alerts us to the loss of one of life's most durable pleasures: the pungent flavors of real (as opposed to overprocessed) cuisines. This is from "Acquired Tastes" (Bantam).

It's very strange. We live in an age when man's interest in his body verges on obsession: every visible moving part is subject to daily scrutiny. . . . Yet, in the midst of this feverish physical surveillance, one small but vital part of the human anatomy is suffering from consistent, deliberate neglect. The palate has become a second-class citizen, and the taste buds are an endangered species, threatened with extinction through boredom.

What has happened, presumably in the interests of more consistent nourishment, is that individual tastes and local flavors have taken a terrible beating at the hands of the mass producers. . . . Bread like plastic, apples like wet socks, cheese with the delicate complexity of a bar of cheap soap, onions with no bite, spinach that would make Popeye choke. It all looks genuine, because everything from the lamb chop to the string bean is bred for appearance, but its resemblance to real food stops the moment you start to chew. It's enough to drive a man to drink. The Helpless "Yes!" of Life

Poetry, Marvin Bell suggests, exists to remind us how unruly, unpredictable the universe is. His thoughts are included in "The Pushcart Prize XVI: Best of the Small Presses," edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors (Pushcart).

We are, all of us, trained not to be helpless. We are schooled in what to do, as well as how, when, where and why to do it. We become purposeful, reasonable, civic, deliberate and . . . predictable and programmable. After all that, art becomes, more and more, the refuge of our helplessness: our purposeless, unreasonable, personal or private, accidental, unpredictable selves. It is where we have a chance to experience the helpless "Yes!" of life, to experience nature and artifice, inner and outer, as if life itself were what there is to life. . . .

It seems to me that poetry springs from the need and the wish to express what this life feels like. Even when it sings of another life or another world, it sings in the frequencies of this one. Lost in the Now

Our great dependence on television threatens to strand us in a present devoid of either true knowledge of the past or informed expectations of the future, Sven Birkerts argues in "American Energies: Essays on Fiction" (Morrow).

One of the most telling effects of the electronic media has been the creation of a persuasive sense of an eternal present, a Now . So powerful is the hold of the image and the rapid-shift sequence, so mesmerizing the juxtaposition of contents, that the watcher is gradually seduced away from causal/ historical habits of mind. The structure of programming allows absolutely no time for absorption or reflection. Hour upon hour the world's montage is rushed past our eyes. . . .

With a steady collage of the past flowing by us on our screens, we find ourselves planted -- marooned -- in the Now. We have not only lost our grip on real history, on the past shaping the present, but we have also lost any vital sense of the future. The possibilities are so unnerving, our awareness of our lack of control so paralyzing, and the diet of present-tense stimulus so addicting that we look no further into the calendar than the time we have circled for our next vacation. Letting the Light In

Among the pleasures of working in an old garden is the sensation of sharing a love of the land with past generations. These musings are by a character in "The Lost Upland" by W. S. Merwin (Knopf).

I laid bare the hard brown knots of ancient blackberry kingdoms, the wiry arteries leading down between stones, mats of finer roots full of the dark soil that they had helped to make. The limestone base of the garden was seldom more than a foot below the surface, and I came to learn, a few inches at a time, clefts and fissures that led down through the porous shield of the upland with its galleries and caverns and underground streams far below me out of the sun. The place itself was a memory that I was recovering. Some few of the living, perhaps, and many of the dead, one by one, had known it this way, inch by inch. They had carried many fields in their minds, like this, and had spoken from that knowledge and had died with it. It was not something you could tell, apart from particular details, now and then. Every day it was strange to me to realize that I was letting the light in, and that as I did so the colors emerged without hesitation from where they had always been. Reading the Future in the Past

We rarely admit how much our visions of the future are shaped by our (sometimes fanciful) ideas about the past, according to G. K. Chesterton in this excerpt from "What's Wrong With the World" (Sherwood Sugden & Company, paper).

Now in history there is no Revolution that is not also a Restoration. Among the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my case. The originality of Michelangelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The wildness of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. . . . Never was the past more venerated by men than it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods. . . . For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. . . . He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past.